Kristopher Jansma - The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards

“Thank you, Pinkerton,” Sokol sighed, shutting his eyes like an enormous baby getting ready for a nap.

“Thank you both,” Morrissey said with a soft expression that pleaded for us to keep this among ourselves. Julian and I nodded then left, shutting the door behind us.

We made it about ten yards before Julian turned to me and said, “Flip you for it.”

“Flip you for what?”

“The story. Flip you for the story. One of us has to write it. Nobody else in that class is going to, I can tell you that.”

I thought he was kidding, but his hand was rooting through his pockets looking for a coin.

“Heads,” I called.

Julian found a quarter and flipped it off his thumb. He snatched it expertly out of the air and checked it against the back of his hand. Tails.

“Cheers!” he shouted. “Now promise you won’t write about it.”

“I promise,” I said.

At the time I didn’t even know that I was lying.

Following this incident, Julian and I stopped for a coffee, and I soon discovered, to my delight, that Julian was not the monastic daydreamer he seemed to be in class. He explained that he simply preferred to write late at night, and on good nights he would get so lost in his writing that he’d suddenly find the sun rising and realize his classes were imminent. After a nap, or some high-test espresso, Julian became a boundless mass of chatty energy.

“That Shelly girl weirds me out ,” he told me as we walked out of class one afternoon. Another girl had written a story about watching her mother give birth, called “The Miracle of Life.” Admittedly it had been atrocious, but Shelly had run out of the room, shaking.

“You ought to keep her away from open windows,” Julian advised.

“And babies. Apparently.”

Julian sighed. “The crazy ones are always better in bed, though.”

I reddened at this. “You have no idea,” I lied. Truth be told, we had not managed to get much of anything done in bed, I was so concerned about crushing her.

Fortunately, Julian appeared to be having a brainstorm. “ You need to meet my friend Ev, from Choate.”

“No offense, but ‘Ev, from Choate’ is a girl, I hope?”

Julian waved his hand dismissively in the air. “Evelyn Lynn Madison Demont. Our families have known each other forever. She’s our age and she’s already practically been nominated for a Tony. She was just in that revival of My Fair Lady with Richard Chamberlain. I’m not even shitting you. The character in your ‘Gravity in Durham’ story reminded me of her. The ‘arctic-souled’ Homecoming Queen, as you put it.”

He explained that Evelyn was strictly a stage actress — film and television being nothing other than opiates for philistinic masses. Then he fumbled with his wallet until he pulled out a crinkled newspaper review for a musical called Samson! and at the top was a picture of her on stage as Delilah, in sheer crimson silk. Even on smudgy newsprint, she was stunning. Slender and high cheeked, with hair tied up in a perfect knot. I could not look away. Her eyes seemed to bore right into me, and somehow she looked bored herself, by what she found there. Her lips parted, a delicate smile for the camera, but I could see it there beneath — an un-smile that matched the look in her eyes.

“Is she in something now? A show, I mean?” I’d never been to New York City before, and I desperately wanted to change that.

“She just finished some thing,” Julian said distractedly. “She comes up here sometimes to do things at summer stock.”

“Where does she go to school?”

“She doesn’t!” Julian laughed, as if it were the most brilliant idea ever. “Although between you and me, she turned down full rides at Ivy League schools.”

“Her parents must have been furious,” I said.

Julian laughed again. “Don’t be silly. What does she need to go to Harvard for? She’s already smarter than you or I will ever be, for all the good it’ll do her. I can’t even imagine her there, with all those neo-con banker babies and sons of sports franchise managers.” He shuddered. “On Broadway she’s being taken out by ambassadors and actual Swiss people, for God’s sake. Makes me wonder what the hell I did wrong to wind up here . Speaking of… what are you writing for the contest?”

A half hour earlier I’d been considering a change of majors. Now suddenly I wanted nothing more than to win the contest and read my story in front of the deans and all the alumni. More than anything, though, I wanted to read it in front of Julian.

I shrugged and asked, “What are you going to write? The Jan Sokol story? You could call it ‘The Guest Lecturer.’”

He grinned and shook his head. “That’s classified, I’m afraid.”

Promising to show me better pictures of the lovely Evelyn, Julian invited me back to his room. He had a double all to himself, after his roommate had withdrawn in the third week, and it was truly the Shangri-La of dormitories. He’d lofted the two beds, wedged the mattresses on the top, and pushed both desks together to create a massive work space, which was covered in library books and unorganized papers. On the wall, in a frame, was a red-and-black chessboard.

“You play chess?” I asked, hardly surprised.

“Yes, but I much prefer checkers,” he said. “We could play, if I had any damn pieces. I keep meaning to buy some, but the pieces always come with a board, and I’ve already got a board. It’s the oldest game in the world. Did you know that? There are hieroglyphics in Egypt with the scores of checkers games, and in one of the tombs they found a whole set! They think it came over from India. Anyways, I keep the board around because I figure someday I’ll find some pieces. You can’t hang a checkerboard on the wall in act one if no one’s going to play it in act two. Chekhov. Or something like that. Can I get you anything?”

He set some coffee on a Bunsen burner and found some bagels in the back of a minifridge. “Six years at boarding schools and you learn how to maximize your space.” He sprinkled the bagels with a strange spice. “ Za’atar . I put it on everything.”

Though I’d never heard of it in my life, I nodded and smiled. “Ah… za’atar ,” I replied. “My grandmother used to put this on her shredded wheat.”

Julian seemed delighted at the idea, and I was thrilled to have gotten one over on him. He continued eagerly, “Maimonides said it cures parasites and flatulence. With that sort of range, I figure it must be good for everything else in between.”

This seemed to be Julian’s philosophy on life: that no one could ever hope to get the breadth of the whole thing, so he would stick to the extremes and assume the middle was thus covered. He knew everything there was to know about Schopenhauer and Napoléon Bonaparte. He read every gossip rag with a headline about the marriage of Lisa Marie Presley and Michael Jackson. But he didn’t seem to know normal things, like the difference between Newt Gingrich and Roger Ebert. Each night after we’d hung out for one hour, I’d spend three more at the library, reading up on everything he’d mentioned, even in passing. And in each word and place I sensed an unfolding universe of stories, just waiting for me to make them real.

Shelly hated him, naturally. As often as he invited her to join us over in Shangri-La, she refused to accept. If I even brought him up in her presence, she rolled her eyes until I stopped.

“He’s totally in love with you,” she snapped.

“That’s absurd,” I said, trying hard not to flush at the suggestion — and it was absurd. About Julian’s preferences in the bedroom I didn’t dare speculate, but I felt certain that his interests in me were as a kindred spirit who shared his deepest obsession. Back home, there’d been no one. Girls could dabble in poetry and keep diaries. But guys were expected to be memorizing sports statistics, not the opening sentence of A Tale of Two Cities . Even my English teachers seemed to hold books several feet from their bodies, as if some contagion might be multiplying within the pages. Julian held books right up close to his face — a habit formed, he explained, in his nearsighted youth — and now, even with contact lenses in, he liked to have the page within a few inches of his eyes. So close that the pages scraped the tip of his nose as he turned them. So close that, when he inhaled sharply at a particularly good turn of phrase, the paper seemed to lift up slightly and tremble before settling back again.